This study investigates the functions of political satire in Iran’s digital sphere through a qualitative content analysis of satirical posts on Twitter and Telegram. In contemporary society, social media platforms have become central arenas for expressing political criticism, shaping public discourse, and navigating constraints on political expression. Political satire, as a key component of online culture, enables users to challenge authority, circumvent censorship, and articulate collective anxieties. The core question guiding this research is how users employ humorous formats to engage with salient political, economic, and social issues circulating in the public sphere.Using a qualitative research design, the study analyzes satirical messages related to three themes—negotiations with the United States, the energy imbalance crisis, and the Hijab Plan. Data were examined through thematic analysis and text-mining techniques. Findings show that users rely on metaphor, irony, exaggeration, and linguistic play to perform several functions: criticizing power structures, raising political awareness, diffusing psychological tension, and facilitating forms of soft resistance. In the political domain, users highlighted themes such as the perceived futility and symbolic nature of negotiations. In the economic dimension, satire centered on managerial inefficiency, unconventional policy responses, and the gap between official promises and lived realities. In the social sphere, recurring themes included regulatory excess, implementation contradictions, and the commodification of the hijab issue.A comparative assessment indicates that economic and social satire are generally more direct than political satire, largely because individuals’ lived experiences in these domains are more immediate. Moreover, Twitter’s character limitations encourage concise, linguistically dense humor, while Telegram affords greater space for narrative elaboration and storytelling.